"Kimonophilia" Exhibition
Local Project
This event has ended.
After 9 months of collaboration and mutual inspiration, Keith Pavia and Beatrice Schleyer are ready to showcase the results of this at Local project art space, a multifaceted intersections of painting and photography spanning the landscape of a common subject: KIMONO
Over the four years that Keith Pavia and Beatrice Schleyer have been neighbors, they have mutually inspired one another, and eventually it became clear that a collaboration was in order. Their first experiment was a simple sketch of Beatrice in a shiromuku (pure white) kimono, standard wear for burial. Beatrice has been exploring the kimono in her photographic portraiture and performance art, and the motif proved to be effective for Pavia as well, the simple sketch transforming into several full scale paintings.
The formal logic of the kimono is completely different from that of western clothing; within its restrictions and basic repeated form lie a world of patterns, geometry, and symbolism. Pavia and Schleyer, having found a mutually resonant subject, have created a body of work that blurs cultural and artistic boundaries. As American artists, they are able to see the kimono in its elegance and potential, unhindered by its association with anachronism in contemporary
Japan.
Hence, this series is also about Xenophilia (a love of the foreign). While the work is an obvious testament to the western fascination with the gentle modesty of Kimono and Japan’s traditional arts, many of the pieces reflect Japan’s attraction to America’s wild, vibrant, and uninhibited spontaneity. Somewhere in this mutual, international fascination lies a cataclysm, a new and unexpected flavor; it is the heart of this collaboration.
The artists used all of the tools in their arsenals to illuminate this subject, and traversed many routes to find intersections between their media. Expect to see surprising permutations of inter disciplinary harmony.
Media
Schedule
from November 10, 2012 to November 23, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-11-10 from 18:00